Romney defends Mass. health law

Mitt Romney used slide after slide in a PowerPoint presentation Thursday to make the case that the health care reform law he signed in 2006 isn’t much like the one President Barack Obama signed last year.

The catch, as Romney all but admitted: Almost nobody believes him.

Story Continued Below

"A lot of pundits are saying I should stand up and say this whole thing is a mistake, admit it and walk away," Romney said in a speech at the University of Michigan. "A lot of folks conclude. There's only one problem: it wouldn't be honest. I did what I believed was right for the people of my state."

Like the federal law, the Massachusetts law contains an individual mandate that requires the purchase of insurance. The federal mandate has become a lightning rod for Republican criticism of Obama’s health care reform law — and the target of numerous lawsuits.

But Romney defended the Massachusetts mandate, saying its goal was "to insist on personal responsibility, to say to folks who could afford to buy insurance, either buy insurance yourself or pay your own way. Either have insurance, or we’ll charge you for the cost the state will have to cover you if you get seriously ill."

In one PowerPoint slide, Romney said Massachusetts’s goal had been to “Help people get and keep their insurance.” Obama’s goal, he said, was “a government takeover of health care.”

But in the run-up to Thursday’s speech, voices on the right and left reached a moment of rare agreement: “Romneycare” is, in fact, almost indistinguishable from “Obamacare.”

“As everyone knows, the health reform Mr. Romney passed in 2006 as Massachusetts governor was the prototype for President Obama's version and gave national health care a huge political boost,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in a scathing editorial.

The paper said Romney should apologize for the Massachusetts law — or just “knock off Joe Biden and get on the Obama ticket.”

“The similarities between what he championed in Massachusetts and what the president has championed are about 100 percent,” Center for American Progress’s Neera Tanden, who sits on the board of the pro-reform group Protect Your Care, said on MSNBC Thursday morning.

Romney vowed in his speech Thursday that, if elected president, he’d sign an executive order paving the way for “Obamacare waivers for all 50 states” and then work with Congress to repeal the health care overhaul. In its place, he said he’d push for new reforms: more control for states, including Medicaid block grants, tax deductions for people who buy their own insurance, medical malpractice reform, and the ability to sell insurance across state lines.

Those proposals have gotten some attention. Former Sen. Jim Talent, now a fellow at the Heritage Institute wrote in the National Review Online Thursday that Romney’s new plan “would create no new federal agencies, does not raise taxes and would aim to reduce federal spending.”

But even Cannon dismissed Romney’s platform as “Republican boilerplate,” recycling ideas well accepted in Republican circles for years now.